This online retreat helps us connect to our deepest ground. It helps us land in our bodies and spacious open awareness. The result is that we feel more alive and deeply in touch with reality
What happens when we, like Jung did over a century ago, let ourselves fall underground? What if we see through our constructed identities, turn toward our deepest fears, and open to the groundless ground of being? What is it like to fully inhabit our body and embrace our beautiful, challenging, and poignant life?
This two day online retreat is based upon John Prendergast’s new book Your Deepest Ground: A Guide to Embodied Spirituality. We will explore our multidimensional ground: egoic, archetypal, and universal. The ground is both a felt-sense of spacious stability that we can palpably experience in the lower half of our body as well as a metaphor for different levels of reality.
The spiritual quest is the profound pull to discover our essential nature. It is most inhibited, either consciously or unconsciously, by the fear of annihilation. We fear losing our illusion of control and opening to the unknown. The unknown is the great mystery that is both life and death. In this quest we gradually discover that we don’t know and can’t know. We don’t need to know who we are and what life is via the ordinary mind. Instead, we learn to trust a deeper, more direct form of knowing.
As we face our fears and more fully inhabit our body, different dimensions of the ground emerge. While Jung’s life work focused on opening to and consciously integrating archetypes, modern Indian sages such as Ramana Maharshi focused on realizing the heart of awareness itself. We will explore the value of each of these traditions as we open to our deepest ground.